But many of us then felt, as our poet Keats
felt on first reading Homer,
"like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken."
It was a strange world that opened before us, a world full of foreign
names which we could neither pronounce nor remember, of foreign customs
and articles of daily life which we could not understand. Yet beneath
all the strangeness there was a deep sense of having discovered a new
home, of meeting our unknown kindred, of finding expressed great burdens
of thought which had lain unspoken and half-realized at the depths of
our own minds. The books were very different one from another, sometimes
they were mutually hostile; yet we found in all some quality which made
them one, and made us at one with them. We will not attempt to analyze
that quality. It was, perhaps, in part, that deep Russian tenderness,
which never derides but only pities and respects the unfortunate; in
part that simple Russian sincerity which never fears to see the truth
and to express it; but most of all it was that ever-present sense of
spiritual values, behind the material and utterly transcending the
material, which enables Russian literature to move so naturally in a
world of the spirit, where there are no barriers between the ages and
the nations, but all mankind is one.
And they call you "barbarians"! The fact should make us ask again what
we mean by the words "culture" and "civilization.
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